New Super Nintendo Game 'Nightmare Busters' Isn't Exactly New [Updated]

Nightmare Busters isn't exactly a new game, though it's being billed as such hither and thither.

The novelty? It's an SNES game, and there haven't been any "new" Super Nintendo games in 15 years (though I suspect that figure may not take into account the indie development scene.)

The thing is Nightmare Busters was already very much a game planned for release on the SNES but for one reason or another publisher Nichibutzu dropped the title and it was never released.

Super Fight Team, the company behind the release of the game, has partnered with the game's original developers to release the game on SNES with a fully modern $60+ price-tag.

[EDIT: I have removed a link to an emulator that runs this game. In the original post I mentioned that it has been available for free via emulators for some time. At the time of writing, I did not even consider that emulating a previously unreleased game could even be considered piracy. My apologies to anyone who feels otherwise. The point of this was simply to illustrate that (as the title of this post illustrates) the game is not new, and it has been played by people online for some time.]

It's also hard to tell from the tiny screenshots on the game's webpage whether or not the graphics have been retooled. It certainly looks like they have, but it could just as easily be that the smaller images simply look crisper than the emulator.

Here's some video (taken several years ago) of the gameplay.

Update:

I want to make it very clear that I in no way support or advocate piracy. To be quite honest, I assumed that a game like this was on an emulator precisely because it was never released. Since it was never released, I assumed that there was some process that its creators must have gone through to license it out to the websites that hosted it, especially since the one I visited apparently charges a subscription fee after you've tried a game a few times.

Either way, my actual intention with this post was to show simply that the game wasn't new, and that in fact people had been playing it via emulators for some time even though it never was released for the SNES. By all means, if you are someone who owns that old, out-of-production system, I recommend you pay for the game if you want to play it. But up until its release, the only way anyone has ever even tried this game was via emulation.

In other words, I am not advocating "stealing" if something is too expensive. That is not my point, and I think only a very uncharitable reading of this post can come to that conclusion.

I would just add that people who have played this game with an emulator, which is not a very good gaming experience, might be the most likely to purchase it for their SNES. I could be wrong about that, but I don't think anyone is guilty of "stealing" when the only way this game was ever available was in this format. Maybe it is unethical to play it this way now since it will be available, though I'm not sure how many people still have Super Nintendos. I hope Super Fight Team sells many, many copies though.

P.S. Does anyone know the law in regards to IPs like this, that were cancelled and abandoned for decades? In other words, was it at one point legal to play via an emulator but now it is no longer legal? As I said, I'm unclear on the laws surrounding emulators in the fist place, but even more so with regards to abandoned software.